Gait correction is a key goal of therapists in healing and training their patients. Gait training helps injured patients to recover from injuries that affect how they run, walk, and jog and helps prevent future injuries. Even though methods of quantitative measuring gait are well known, there are significant limitations in current methods. Many gait evaluation tools are designed primarily to measure gait function at full body weight, and many patients are unable to bear full body weight or have abnormal gait at full body weight and lack the ability to effectively alter their gait under such load. Additionally, these systems are typically designed for investigational purposes, presenting detailed data to analysis-oriented researchers. Unloading systems such as harnesses or pools apply pressure in a fashion that alters gait undesirably and therefore impair accurate evaluation or training of gait. Due to the way differential air pressure unweighing systems support their patients, they do not introduce the same external factors that harnesses and pools do. Because of the lack of gait measurement tools in differential air pressure systems, many clinical therapists, who are tasked with correcting gait and not only measuring it, often rely exclusively on their experience to estimate what and how the patient should be training with respect to their gait. This approach has shown to be effective, however the practice is more art than science, so standard of care can vary between therapists providing treatment.
Though a number of gait measurement tools exist primarily for laboratory environments, there are several reasons why these systems are not widely used in the rehab environment. In the lab environment, the tools to instrument a patient are generally more costly than most therapy centers can afford. The laboratories themselves are designed to gather data, not to effectively treat patient problems. Even an analysis done on the data that has been gathered is rarely helpful to the patient during the treatment session, partially because the labs do not have quantitative data available in real time. Often the data is also not presented in an understandable way so laboratory environments are sub-optimal at treating patients.
In addition to the limitations of the current equipment used for gait measurement, many patients simply lack the strength or experience too much pain to perform suitably in full weightbearing systems to attain gait improvements. As a result of the variations in patient training ability as well as the variety of gait systems, there remains a need for improved systems to train and improve gait in patients.